Pinhole photography

I used a biscuit tin and light sensitive multi grade paper to create this pinhole photograph. I really liked the high contrast effect of the image created by exposing it for 90seconds.

Photograms and Solarisation

I enjoyed experimenting with solarisation and photograms in the darkroom and liked the effects created by them. i don't think i will use them in my final pieces as I prefer to work with digital but I still enjoyed creating these pieces.

Solarisation

Photograms

Testing Altered Lenses

We tried altering the lens using various items to distort the image slightly and create different effects. We used tights over the lens to create a softer look, Vaseline to create blurred edges and a lens baby to distort the faces.

Lens Baby

Tights

Vaseline

Self Portraits

We were asked to take self portraits for the focus and framing project we are doing at the moment. The only rule was that they had to include an element of personality and identity in them. I chose to include my personality through hobbies (photography and music) and these are the self portraits I took. The neighbors goat made an appearance half way through the shoot which was interesting as another love of mine is animals so it kind of fit in with the shoot! The location for the shoot was near to my home and I used an old photo I have of my Granddad that I especially like to use as the scene and the photos where I am standing are where my granddad stood in his photo.

My Granddad 

Hockney's Joiner Images

Earlier today I went into town to practice shooting some Joiner style images. Here are the results...i think they worked out quite well for a first try. I do like the tree one more than the ran as i think the ram looks a lot more abstract style than the tree.

Time

During the course of this project I feel I have developed many skills and learnt some new things along the way. The artists I researched for this project especially, helped me to gain a lot of ideas and inspiration for this project and I especially liked going out and experimenting with different styles and also different cameras. Before this project I hadn’t really used film at all, during the project I got to develop my own film and then create prints from the negatives which I found really interesting.

During the project we also experimented with multiple exposures which again, I hadn’t really done before and I think this was a good skill to learn as I think the outcomes look effective and I really liked the style of the studio image I created using a 5x4 monorail camera.

For my ideas in this project I wanted to create three long exposures of cars at night to try and capture the essence of rush hour. I also wanted to create my other three pieces on a similar style to Henri Cartier Bresson but shooting band photography as this is something I am interested in. I wanted to capture three images that were at the ‘perfect’ moment.

For the images of cars at night using long exposure photography, I visited quite a few different locations to shoot my images, until I found three places I liked to shoot my mages. The first places I visited had street lights above the road and I wasn’t too keen on this showing in my final pieces as I thought it distracted attention away from the car lights. Below are the three final images I chose and edited.

I was pleased with how my final pieces turned out as the emphasised the car lights, which is what I set out to do and also I think they capture rush hour like I wanted. However, I think with the images the roundabout one doesn’t look like it fits too much to the set and although I really liked this image I think it would have looked better from a higher angle looking down on the roundabout, but unfortunately this was not possible.

For my three decisive moment images I took photos at gigs of a band I know called Ashestoangels. I wanted my set of three images to work well together and really capture the decisive moment, which is quite hard in itself but even harder when the band are constantly running and moving around and also the low light situations I was working in as well. Below are my three final images.

I am happy with how these images turned out as I think each of them do show the decisive moment well. I cropped them into squares as this helped to show movement and focused the eye more onto the image. I think in hindsight I could have made them either all colour or all black and white, however the others looked better in black and white and the centre image didn’t so I put the colour image in the centre to make it fit more and I think this works as a set of images.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project. I learnt new skills, like how to use the old style film cameras, the 5x4 monorail, the Ricoh KR-10M and the Pentax film camera and I really enjoyed experimenting with these. I also enjoyed developing my own film, even though it was quite hard to do I think it worked out well and working in the darkroom was something else I had never done before so I found this quite interesting and insightful to do. I still prefer shooting in digital though as I like being able to get instant feedback on the images I shoot and also it’s more practical for the type of photography I like to shoot. I think my two sets of images worked out well and given the amount of experimenting and testing ideas done beforehand I think this helped my images turn out much better than if I hadn’t done much experimenting before creating my final pieces.

Zoom Burst and Long exposure Experimentation

Here are some experiments I did with long exposure and zoom burst photography. I think they worked quite well, even though I'm not fond of a zoom burst style of photographs. I liked how the long exposure turned out before it got dark as I like the way the sky looks in the image.